Thought Id just share one of the days I could well do without.


Just saved my game with about 10 hours left to completion including graphics. Thought "aaahhh, better copy and paste in to the backup file - just in case". Did that no problem.....

Thought - take a 5 minute break - load the van for work tomorrow - so went to put the roofing primer in the van , dropped it and now I have a really nice black floor which took 2 hours to clean and cost me a fortune in primer. OK, sorted - went back to the comp - started up tab and loaded in my game. HUH! response is open and I don’t recognise the content..... ran it Oh, Character commands example - ... how’s this me thinks (bet you’ve guessed what’s happening here?) Reloaded the game again - nope still Character commands ................ Oh dear I’ve save the Character commands over my game - how , lord only knows NO PROBLEM I’ve a backup I’ve saved ....just .......................now................................. starts using language that only a docker would be proud of. So, after some 250 hours I drop 56 pounds of paint and screw up my game fully.........

I cannot find a moral to this story accept to say .......... Oh well I could be living in Japan at present...

Tomorrows another day and after 3 tries Ill shelve the faraway tree for now and create something small and fun ... just to get an achievement feeling
Gareth! .. :-(

Hi Gareth,

I am very sorry to learn of this disaster - it really is bad news.

Sympathy aside, I really don't know what to say except advise multiple backups... and even keep a copy online somewhere.

One thing you can do to try and prevent such an event is to always save your current "work in progress" data outside of the normal default "adventure games to play" directory. In other words don't save your game inside the usual folder where all the example databases are stored - just save inside the TAB folder for instance; or maybe into a newly named folder inside TAB eg: "mygame".
The file requester will "remember" the path to your file during your data building session.
Then if you later loaded a TAB example like "character_commands_demo.tab" into the Editor and then accidentally renamed it to the name of your gamefile, the save file requester would open up inside the "adventure_games_to_play" folder and no harm would be done if were saved under that name in that location.
(In fairness TAB does ask for confirmation when you try to save a file under a different name)

Another option is to save each update of your game under a progressive numbered filename eg: mygame001; mygame002, mygame003..........
making a permanent record of each step of your progress.
That way at least you can get back to the previous update if you do similar filesaving error.

I can remember having similar days myself.

Regards,
catventure (Phil)

Your absolutly right Phil

Im more annoyed at myself for assuming Id saved the right file for backup..... So excited to be near a final job finished. Ah well as I said, no one died and worse has happened in Japan - we live and learn - sometines.

Speak soo with my new idea - suppose a good point is Ive learned loads from the build of the Faraway tree

G